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(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
It is not our regular habit to hold former Attorney General Bill Barr up as a model of legal ethics or reasoning. The list of sins is long and undistinguished. He knows what he did.
But in the debacle surrounding Trump’s purloined government documents and the search warrant on Mar-a-Lago, he’s been a rare voice of reason in the Republican camp, repeatedly telling Fox News viewers that the screaming from Trumpland is utter bullshit.
Here’s Barr last week telling Sandra Smith and John Roberts that a special master is a “red herring,” since Trump has no personal interest in keeping anything from the government other than his own attorney-client communications, and any personal items collected were “seizable under the warrant because they show the conditions under which the classified information was being held.”
Asked if there was any legitimate reason for Trump to possess classified documents, or if there was a standing declassification order for records removed to the president’s private quarters, Barr practically rolled his eyes.
“If in fact he sort of stood over scores of boxes, not really knowing what was in them, and said ‘I hereby declassify everything in here,’ that would be such an abuse, that shows such recklessness, that it’s almost worse than taking the documents,” scoffed the man who deliberately buried evidence that the Declassifier in Chief had extorted the leader of a foreign country for dirt on his electoral opponent.
This being Fox News, of course Barr faced some pushback.
“There’s some questions about the timeline,” Smith jumped in. “There are some who fall in the camp of, looking at the unprecedented nature of a raid of the former president’s home like this, that perhaps there was more room for the authorities to obtain these materials without raiding the president’s home while he was not even there.”
But Barr wasn’t having any of it.
Let me just say, I think the driver on this from the beginning was, you know, loads of classified information sitting in Mar-a-Lago. People say this was unprecedented, well it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put them in a country club, okay? And how long is the government going to try to get that back? They jawboned for a year, they were deceived on the voluntary actions taken, they then went and got a subpoena, they were deceived on that, they feel. And the facts are starting to show, that they were being jerked around and so how long, you know, how long do they wait?
That was before Judge Aileen Cannon gave Trump the special master, not just to weed out attorney-client documents, but anything which might plausibly be protected by executive privilege, as well as all personal property and records, and told the DOJ to quit using the documents to investigate Trump. Today Barr was even less impressed.
“The opinion, I think, was wrong, and I think the government should appeal it,” he told Fox News’s Martha MacCallum, agreeing with the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy.
“I don’t think the appointment of a special master is going to hold up, but even if it does, I don’t see it fundamentally changing the trajectory,” he went on, calling the master’s review a mere “rain delay.”
“The fundamental dynamics of the case are set,” he said, describing prosecutors’ “very strong evidence” that “government documents were taken, classified information was taken and not handled appropriately, … and there’s some evidence to suggest that they were deceived.”
He also points out that whether or not a document is covered by executive privilege is largely irrelevant — it may shield the records from disclosure, but the crime relates to the character of the documents, i.e., whether they were classified or simply property of the US government, and not their contents. It’s not like an assertion of executive privilege, even if successful (haha), would entitle Trump to stick the docs back in his pool locker.
The message is strikingly at odds with Fox’s opinion journalists, who’ve spent the month telling the network’s viewers that the Justice Department is witch hunting the former president, implying that there was something other than bog standard about the warrant, and platforming various MAGA loons to give air to theories that Trump somehow had a right to keep military secrets in his basement.
No one is more surprised than we are to see the guy who spread lies about mail-in voting and supposed Antifa supersoldiers flying around the country to sow havoc. But if Bill Barr wants to redeem his name by being the voice of reason … well, it won’t work.
But still, uh, thanks, dude?
Bill Barr Blows Up Every Trumpy Defense of the Mar-a-Lago Docs in Brutal Fox News Interview [Daily Beast]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
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